Monday, May 12, 2008

BBC Bloom

The BBC have launched a new website aimed at encouraging people to make the right choices and lower their carbon emissions. 'Bloom' suggests actions you can take in every area of life to be more climate conscious. You just choose the action you're going to take, plant a 'seed' on your page, and watch the resulting flowers grow. Or bloom, I suppose.

You can search the actions based on easiness (the easiest is washing clothes at 30 degrees), cheapness (a cheap option, for example is to 'use your dress sense' to make your existing clothes last longer, while a more expensive action is to invest in an electric car), carbon rating (installing a biomass boiler wins on this front), and popularity on the site.

The site also aggregates BBC news on climate change-related issues, or you can search for audio or video content.

You can create a login for yourself in order to save your actions and watch your collection of flowers grow, and the fact that you can see what other users have been doing adds a nice sense of community. The site's in beta at the moment, so there aren't a lot of other 'bloomers' to compare yourself to, but it will be interesting to see how the site develops.